Copilot is one of two LLMs I’ve briefly tried. It was noticeably better than Gemini was at the time, but still seemed entirely pointless. Nothing it (or Gemini) offered to do were things I wanted help with. I enjoy research and writing, so why would I outsource those things and burn down an acre of rainforest in the process?
And this is the saddest part. The primary victims will be young children, suffering through a potentially deadly disease because of their parents’ credulity.
I met my partner through a dating site. In the two years prior to that, I had used the site to meet over two dozen other women, which led to no long-term relationships but did result in a few short flings.
I can say that what helped me was expectation management. This was actually my second time using a dating site, and the first time around I was super picky, looking for “green flags.” Correspondingly, I messaged very few women, and met even fewer (four in two years). The second time, I realized that someone having a sparse profile didn’t mean they were a boring or lazy person. Sometimes it does, but other times it just means they aren’t very good at writing about themselves.
I’ll also say there’s only so much the metrics of dating sites can tell you about someone and your compatibility with them. There’s a level of response bias to the questionnaires on these sites, i.e. people answer the questions based on what they think a potential partner might like, not their genuine beliefs and preferences. You’ll never discover your actual compatibility with someone unless you talk to them, so I took the approach of, “unless there are explicit deal breakers in your profile, I’ll ask you on a date and we’ll see how things go.”
There’s also the expectation management for the frequency of matches, responses to messages, dates, and beyond. Dating apps aren’t magic machines that will get you hooked up in hours. They take work, and you’ll see a lot of rejection (most of it just utter silence). There can be long dry spells. Sometimes you’ll need to take a break because you’ve literally messaged everyone on the site and you need to wait for more members. And sometimes, they just won’t work for some people. That sounds harsh, but it’s true. Success for many of these sites and apps is highly dependent on one’s physical attractiveness, and some people simply did not win the genetic lottery.
The article says “Canadian leaders” but only mentions the Deputy PM by name. That troubles me.
Canada is on track to a Conservative government in our next election. The current Liberal regime is long in the tooth and Trudeau is unpopular. One of my biggest worries is that the new Conservative government will put appeasing Trump over the interests of Canadians.
I looked at a few Canadian news outlets, and it seems that this announcement by the Deputy PM is coming on the heels of a First Ministers’ meeting, which is the council of the PM and all ten provincial premiers. Nothing about this indicates that the federal opposition is on board, though the most conservative premier (Danielle Smith of Alberta) seemed to think it was a productive meeting.
Nah, just the sad message of “Pretty please love me (because we sunk a bunch of money into this).”
One of the things I initially liked about Pixels was that I could uninstall/disable a lot of the proprietary garbage that would be mandatory on other phones. But now it looks like Google is abandoning that flexibility in favour of shoehorning Gemini into everything.
My only interaction with Gemini so far was telling it to kick rocks when it sent me an unsolicited text message. I also barely use Assistant to begin with. So once my current phone dies, I guess I’ll have to find something new.
The actual monetary loss to Air Canada (known affectionately as Fuckstick Flights Inc.) was insignificant, but the PR was bad.
Then again, I can’t remember the last time AC had positive press. Before that they forced a guy with cerebral palsy to drag himself off the plane.
I’ll fully admit to being completely ignorant about voting the first time I did it. I was politically disengaged for moody teenager reasons, but my parents forced me to go to the polling station anyway. I didn’t care to vote for any of the candidates, but was also worried that I would get in trouble if I spoiled my ballot because I hadn’t paid attention in civics (again, for moody teenager reasons).
I’ve never experienced that, and I’ve definitely told Google Assistant to fornicate with itself on multiple occasions.
I had never heard of Humane until I read this article. After also reading Engadget’s review of the thing, it sounds like an absolute nightmare to use.
Maybe I’m too old-school and impatient, but I’ve never been able to make voice assistants work for me. It’s a feedback loop: the assistant fails to do a task, so I become resistant to using it in the future. Even the thing I’ve used an assistant for the most, playing music out of a Nest speaker, seems to still be hit-or-miss after years of trying, and in some ways seems to be getting worse.
The gestures also sound awful. As with voice assistants, I’ve never gotten comfortable with smartphone gestures beyond the most rudimentary. I strictly use 3-button navigation on my phone, and I use Connect as my Lemmy app of choice because it allows me to disable all the swipe commands for upvote/downvote.
I am but one man whose only education in programming was a first year university course in C from almost two decades ago (and thus I am liable to completely botch any explanation of CS concepts and/or may just have faulty memories), but I can offer my own opinion.
Most basic programming concepts I was taught had easily understood use cases and produced observable effects. There were a lot of analogous concepts to algebra, and functions like printf did things that were concrete and could be immediately evaluated visually.
Pointers, on the other hand, felt designed purely of and for programming. Instead of directly defining a variable by some real-world concept I was already familiar with, it was a variable defined by a property of another variable, and it took some thinking to even comprehend what that meant. Even reading the Wikipedia page today I’m not sure if I completely understand.
Pointers also didn’t appear to have an immediate use case. We had been primarily concerned with using the value of a variable to perform basic tasks, but none of those tasks ever required the location of a variable to complete the calculations. We were never offered any functions that used pointers for anything, either before or after, so including them felt like busywork.
It also didn’t help that my professor basically refused to offer any explanation beyond a basic definition. We were just told to arbitrarily include pointers in our work even though they didn’t seem to contribute to anything, and I really resented that fact. We were assured that we would eventually understand if we continued to take programming courses, but that wasn’t much comfort to first year students who just wanted to pass the introductory class they were already in.
And if what you said is true, that later courses are built on the assumption that one understands the function and usefulness of pointers despite the poor explanations, then its no wonder so many people bounce off of computer science at such a low level.
I definitely feel this. I had to take a programing course in university and I was easily able to follow along up until the lesson on pointers, whereupon I completely lost the thread and never recovered.
I’ve known a good number of computer scientists over the years, and the general consensus I got from them is that my story is neither unique nor uncommon.
I’ve gotten the pop-up once or twice, but updating uBlock fixed that.
I have instead noticed a large decrease in quality, things like frozen images/pages and endless buffering. I don’t know if all that is related, but it did start around the time YouTube started cracking down on ad blockers.
My first attempt to cancel my SiriusXM subscription saw the agent tell me that it was “impossible” because I had “just renewed.” It was true that I had recently renewed, but only because I had forgotten to cancel it in time. Since that was my mistake I was willing to just let it go and just use the service another year. But in order to stop that from happening again, I wanted to cancel early, which they didn’t let me do.
My second attempt three months later saw the agent protest again, saying that I should call back when it was closer to renewal. This time I put my foot down and got them to cancel my renewal.
Or so I thought.
I finally had to call them again eight months later after I started getting emails hyping up my impending renewal. It seems that instead of outright canceling, they had instead put a note on my file to cancel at a later date - a note I’m presuming they were going to ignore.
Maybe their system really did make it impossible for front-line agents to cancel to far out from the renewal date. That would explain the agents’ behaviour, and if true it makes SiriusXM look even worse
Definitely the worst experience I’ve ever had trying to cancel a subscription.
I’m in the same camp. I was generally fine when it was an occasional skippable pre-roll ad before some videos. But the last time I watched a video without a blocker, there were two unskippable ads at the start plus two more each at the 7 and 14 minute mark of a 20 minute video.
This hour has 22 minutes indeed.
I’m always a bit amused when these sites and apps say things like, “If you turn off ad personalization, the ads you see won’t be as useful to you.”
My dude, I don’t think I’ve ever willingly clicked on an ad in my entire life. “Personalizing” them won’t change that.
I can think of a bunch of other things that Google should be embarrassed about, but Gemini is uniquely humiliating because of how proud they are of it and how hard they are pushing it.